Special Approval

Use

In approval procedures for recorded working times, it may be useful to restrict the volume of data to that which is particularly sensitive and therefore requires checking. You can use the special approval function to do so for time sheet data. It means that not all working times recorded in the time sheet are subject to an approval procedure. You can specify in Customizing the data that you want to be approved.

For a special approval, the system determines the data to be approved according to the recorded working time attributes, not according to the employees who entered the data.

Example Example

You want to incorporate an approval procedure only for working times with the following working time attributes:

End of the example.

  • Employees’ absences and special attendances. However, you do not want attendances of the type 0800 ( productive hours ) to be subject to approval.

  • Particular activities in a project

  • Particular projects or orders

Features

  • You specify the regulations for the special approval in the Customizing settings. You can assign each data entry profile a group of rules according to which the data entered with that profile is to be determined for approval.

  • In the rules for special approval, you specify the working time attributes that are to trigger an approval procedure. You can specify exactly which values a working time attribute has to have for approval to be required.

    Example Example

    You want approval to be required only in the following cases:

    End of the example.

    • Employees have entered information that is relevant for payment, such as overtime, or activities paid at a higher rate. The system checks the data records and makes them available for approval only if the relevant fields are filled.

    • Employees are working on a project for which the costs are being closely monitored. The system only provides data with the corresponding project number for approval.

  • To set rules for the special approval, it is useful to process decision trees to enable the system to select the data to be approved. The Human Resources application has a tool for selecting data according to a decision tree. It offers the following advantages:

    • You can use it without knowledge of ABAP.

    • The graphical user interface enables you to see at a glance the decision at which a special approval is to be processed.

    • You can use it even if you have not installed SAP Human Resources.

      For more information about using features, see Editor for Features . Note in particular the sections under Maintaining a Feature .

  • After the system has determined the data to be approved, you can use the following methods to determine the approver responsible:

    • Manual selection of an approver using the employees’ organizational assignment. This is useful for data that is relevant for Human Resources.

    • Automatic selection of an approver based on the recorded working time attributes. This is useful for data that is relevant for monitoring the progress of a project or order.

    • A mixture of the above, dependent on the working time attribute entered.

      For more information, see Approval Based on Recorded Working Time Attributes .

      Note Note

      You cannot use the function for automatic determination of an approver for data requiring special approval.

      End of the note.